Bankhead Visiting Writers Series Begins New Season with Lynn Emanuel and Joyelle McSweeney

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – Lynn Emanuel and Joyelle McSweeney will kick off the 2003-04 Bankhead Visiting Writers Series on Sept. 11 at 7:30 p.m. in 205 Smith Hall on The University of Alabama campus.

Emanuel has been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and the National Poetry Series Award. She holds a master of fine arts from the University of Iowa and is director of the writing program at the University of Pittsburg. She is a Coal Royalty Chairholder in Creative Writing at UA for the fall 2003 semester.

She is the author of three books of poetry, most recently “Then, Suddenly” (1999), a selection of the Academy of American Poets’ Poetry Book Club. Her other books include “The Dig” and “Hotel Fiesta,” which were reprinted in a single collection in 1995. In addition, she is the author of two chapbooks, “The Technology of Love” and “Oblique Light.”

Emanuel’s work has been selected for the “Pushcart Prize Anthology” and “Best American Poetry” and has been published in more than 50 literary magazines including “The American Poetry Review,” “Ploughshares” and “The Georgia Review.” She also has served as poetry editor for the “Pushcart Prize Anthology.”

McSweeney attended Oxford University and Harvard before receiving her master of fine arts from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. She joined the Program in Creative Writing at UA as an assistant professor this fall.

She is the author or “The Red Bird,” winner of the 2001 Fence Modern Poets Series Prize selected by Allen Grossman. Her poems have appeared in the “Boston Review,” “Poetry,” “Bridge,” “The May Anthologies” and “Oxford Poetry,” among others.

The Bankhead Visiting Writers Series is made possible by an endowment from the Bankhead Foundation, The University of Alabama’s Program in Creative Writing, the department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences. For more information, please contact UA’s creative writing program at 205/348-0766 or visit www.bama.ua.edu/~writing.